Not sure who this girl is but James took this photo a while ago. Photo/James K Lowe.

Highs:

The Olympics.

Very soon Ben and I are off on a holiday and it is really exciting because it has been a while since I went on a holiday and I have been saving and yeah, I’m going to have no money at all when I get back but hey, I could die soon so seize the day and all that. We’re going to London to see some friends and to Copenhagen and to this little island in Greece that has no wheeled vehicles (you walk, water taxi or take a donkey ride! Also, while on the topic of Greece, is it just me or am I literally the last person to go to Greece? It’s like every single person has gone there this European Summer), and then we are going to Paris. I haven’t been back to Paris since whenever I last posted a blog post about Paris (2012? I don’t know) and mate, I am excited. We are doing this trip in a short period of time but we don’t have that many plans so please, if you have a MUST SEE or MUST DO that you don’t think I would’ve heard of already yet, tell me! Email me!

Get some prawns. Raw. Get them, and put them in a bag of flour. Take them out, shake them off and put them in a frying pan with a bit of butter and HELLO THIS IS WHAT I WILL BE EATING FOR THE NEXT MONTH. DELICIOUS.

Oi, 3.5 months until Gilmore Girls is back.

This is kind of random but because I am going to sunny Europe I have been stocking up on sunscreen and stuff and I thought I would tell you the best face sunscreen I have come by so far is by Ultraceuticals. This sounds like an ad but it’s not. The stuff rubs in without that weird white glow you get sometimes with other sunscreens and it’s not too greasy and it comes in SPF 50, or SPF 30. It’s kind of expensive, but it lasts for quite a long time. I also like this one by Dr Jart but I don’t think you can get that in NZ so yeah, if you are on the hunt for a high quality sunscreen for your face that isn’t going to f up your skin or not rub in, look up Ultraceuticals.

Low(e)s:

I used to be able to write whatever on here because it didn’t matter because no one read this blog and now people still don’t really read this blog but I’m way more weary about offending someone or writing something that comes across a way it shouldn’t and now this blog isn’t really funny anymore.

I feel like I don’t really do anything anymore, like I’m stuck in the grind – work, save for holiday, work, exercise, eat, sleep. I don’t actually feel too sad about it, but it’s weird. I go on instagram and think ‘wow, I ain’t got shit I want to post on here’, like nothing new to say, or at least nothing new I want to share with strangers. Is this the end? Have I come full circle? I remember being on that blog grind with Isaac when getting content was number one and you’d bloody do all these things just so you had something to say. I mean, I did ‘What I Wore Today’ posts every day for like a year! I was so keen to be all out there like LOOK AT ME GUYS, LOOK AT MY LIFE, LOOK AT WHO I’M WITH and now I’m like, in my bed on Sunday and I’m old and I just want to have lunch with my friends in peace. Full circle.

The hunt for the perfect summer sandal. Halp!

Everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to get married or saying ‘when you have kids’ and I never know how to respond so I’m always like ‘haha’ or do a weird, awkward laugh and they’re like ‘nah, but you’re running out of time’ in this kind of jovial manner to tone down the obvious seriousness they feel about the lack of time I have. It’s so awkward, it happens to me so often these days. What if I don’t get married or have kids? Does that make me a bad person? A bad woman? What if I don’t even want to? Then what?

A recent trip to the Miss Crabb store on Ponsonby Road lead me to discover Areez Katki‘s new range of knits for Winter 2016. If you have not come across the collection and you like unique, high quality, designed and made in New Zealand pieces - all the fibres used in Areez’s Winter 2016 collection are made from a selection of Organic Heritage Merino yarns, and are sourced (grown, batch-dyed & spun) in Hawkes Bay – you really need to check it out.

The pieces that immediately caught my attention was the aran-knit crew-neck sweater (I know, I gravitate to the same things in the same colours, I’m a creature of habit okay?) that also comes in an amazing oatmeal, and the above, super soft, wide rib dress that I’m pretty sure I’m too old to pull off, but would if I could.

Anyway, I liked the stuff so much I decided that I would wrangle a couple of new faces from work (I work at Clyne, did you know that? I don’t know if I told you or not) and have James shoot them in a couple of pieces. I’m super happy with the results, see below.

Speaking of talented kids, I’m obsessed with this one. If I am ever in a bad mood, watching this cheers me right up. He’s so bloody cute.

We finished all of Gilmore Girls (which was fantastic, by the way. Highly recommend the re-watch) and started watching that tv show, Shameless – the US version. I mean, I’m nowhere near as invested as I was in Gilmore Girls but it’s still a really entertaining, easy to watch show. And before you start, no I haven’t seen Stranger Things yet but it’s on the bloody list, okay?

The Matteau Swim Summer 2016 lookbook. I know it came out last year but I’m slow okay? I was completely sold on a swimsuit from looking at this lookbook. Often I will see a pic of something and think it’s cool and maybe even put it in my shopping cart and then close the window, but it’s rarely that I will see a pic of something and think it’s cool and fully follow through with the purchase, ESPECIALLY when it’s a swimsuit or something that I can’t try on. Anyway, my point is the lookbook is good and I ordered a swimsuit .

You probably already know, but my friend Maddy Budd left to go live in New York and I thought I would be fine about it but I got really sad and upset. I mean, I am happy for her and really proud and everything but also quite nostalgic at the same time. It was quite unexpected, me being so cut up, but I don’t know, it feels like her leaving marked the end of an era. That whole period of my life, the friends, this blog, it all kind of just stopped and got put in the ‘history’ section and now I’m here like, well what era am I in now?

I’m surrounded by people with bronchitis. (This is a low for them and for me).

People who use Facebook messenger to do business. I mean, I get it if you don’t have the person’s email address and you want to ask them for their email, but if not, it’s like, don’t bloody Facebook chat me your business proposal! Keep it professional guys!

iPhone chargers.

I don’t want to be a hater here but wow, I fully cannot understand the ongoing appeal of Pokemon Go. I thought maybe the hype would’ve died by now but boy was I wrong.

Oi I was supposed to blog on here so much but I didn’t this whole month and that fucks me off even though it’s my own fault. I had this whole post idea the other day when I was lying in bed and I was thinking about what would’ve happened if I had left my ex-boyfriend when I found out he cheated on me (as opposed to like, a year later) and what I would tell my younger self if I could, because fuck, I was such a weakling back then. Anyway, I guess I could still do that post, it will probably just take me a million years to gather the motivation to do so.

You know what? I got the phone call asking if I would like to go to Stockholm courtesy of H&M like, five weeks ago. I actually left for Stockholm two weeks ago. Two whole weeks. You would think being all internet and a blogger and what-not that I would’ve posted something about it on here by now but hey, do you know what? I’m technologically disabled. I’m typing on a Macbook Air that belongs to my dad. The thing doesn’t directly accept the SD card from my camera and I can’t find the USB cord so I’m basically doing this wireless transfer of images from my camera to my phone, and then email the images to myself, then downloading the bloody images to the computer and uploading them to this blog post. That’s the level of admin we’re dealing with right now, on this Friday night.

So yeah, I’ve been sitting here for ages doing that so now I’m tired and I’ve decided instead of telling the story of my trip to Sweden in actual real life words, I’m going to do it in pictures, with captions. Kind of like postcards or something. Some might call that a cop-out, but hey, it’s my blog, it’s my life, I do what I want.

That’s how it started. I got a phone call, “H&M are flying some New Zealand media and bloggers to Stockholm to visit their head office and learn about the company and you’re invited, do you want to come?” I said “yes, of course! I’ve never been to Sweden before, that sounds dope! Lock it in!” and then I asked my boss for the week off in such a way that he would feel terrible if he said no, and two weeks later I boarded a plane to Hong Kong, then transferred onto another plane to Frankfurt, and then transferred onto another plane to Stockholm, and that is where this picture story starts:

I don’t usually like posting straight up look books because it seems kind of like a waste of internet space, you know? Like, they’re everywhere, on so many people’s blogs and sites and I know there’s limitless amounts of storage on the internet but it seems just like a waste when they’re duplicated a hundred million times over. That being said, I am about to go and contradict everything I just said and post some of my favourites from the Georgia Alice Northern Hemisphere AW16-17 collection (our Southern Hemisphere’s SS16-17 collection) because I really believe it is worth you all taking the time to look at.

I have basically all the images at my disposal and I have narrowed them down to my favourite items of clothing, ones that I really feel like I would wear in real life, or ones that I really wish I could wear in real life if I looked like Seen, the model in these pics. Please have a look, I know I am kind of biased because James took these shots and he is my brother, but I really do love them:

I went to Sydney on the weekend to see Bon Iver play this special retrospective show as part of the Vivid festival and it was at the Sydney Opera House and it was amazing. I took some videos with my Fuji but the audio quality is bad, there’s one on my instagram incase you want to hear it, and I guess if you follow me on snapchat you would’ve heard way better audio on there (how is that a thing? The iPhone has incredible audio quality for a phone). I don’t even really have words for the concert really but they played on this circular stage with the audience around them and I am positive hundreds of people were crying in that room, it was so good. Cool Longwinded Backstory: The last (and first) time I went to see Bon Iver was I think in 2012. I missed their show in Wellington because I’m an idiot and basically I knew I was going to New York and I would be alone but I saw they were playing so I decided I would buy 3 tickets in advance from New Zealand at like, US$50 each (the exchange rate was really good) and I thought I would just figure out who could come with me later. Anyway, it turns out the person who said they would go with me got sick, then this guy I met in New York who also said he would go ended up working late that night and really last minute I called Jenny Albright and her friend Simon and they rushed up to Radio City Music Hall to watch with me and it was really great and I remember feeling so glad I went and thinking it was one of the best shows I had ever seen, and I was really sad that they had announced they probably wouldn’t play together again forever or at least for a while, so when Volcano Choir got announced to play in at a festival Boston in 2014, Ben and I got really excited and added Boston onto our trip to New York, and then when we got there a giant storm was coming and their set got cancelled and we were so sad and fast forward to now and Sydney and ALL OUR DREAMS HAVE COME TRUE.

I’m going somewhere exciting next week, a place in the world I have never been to, WATCH THIS SPACE.

Low(e)s:

I have been sitting on the brink of being sick for like, a week. Constant state of feeling 70%, it is shit.

The parking isn’t very good where I live. There is this parking bay that fits 6 cars comfortably, but there are no lines drawn to separate the parks and there is one dickhead in a red car that ALWAYS PARKS IN THE MIDDLE OF TWO SPACES. Basically they leave space, but not enough for a car to fit. It’s so weird, it’s always that red car, it’s like they see the two gaps free and go ‘oh, I will just go half in one, half in the other’. Idiot.